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under, Marek began by asking, as he always did, about the subject’s movements during the previous hour.
    Daniels responded by saying he had shot Jennifer in the basement boiler room. When the doctor and others expressed surprise, Daniels reached into his coat pocket and laid the aforementioned weapon on his lap. One of the other patients, a Homer Linden, got up and snatched the gun away. Marek and another group member, Lainie Bishop, went down to the boiler room while Linden and the last group member, a Donald Ramelli, watched over Daniels. Marek and Ms. Bishop discovered the body and came back upstairs, by which time Ramelli had already called the police.
    Short supplementary statements of each group member affirmed the consensus story. All were certain that Daniels and the decedent were having a sexual relationship.
    A report from Ballistics established the revolver as the murder weapon. A second, from the medical examiner, confirmed two bullet wounds to the chest as the cause of death, with no indication of pre- or post-mortem sexual activity or assault.
    There were some lab results on William himself. One from the state police at 1010 Commonwealth Avenue stated that a paraffin test on William’s hands showed he’d fired a weapon recently. Another said his blood tested positive for no drug except flurazepam, whatever the hell that was. The last entry in the file was from a court-ordered shrink, certifying Daniels as sane at the time of the shooting and competent to stand trial now. I took down all relevant names and addresses, then closed the folder.
    Rothenberg came in just as I was putting my list into a coat pocket. He was carrying several pieces of typed paper.
    “Sorry to be so long,” he said brightly.
    “I kept myself amused.”
    “Well?”
    “Can we talk? In the clear, I mean?”
    Rothenberg frowned, then gave me a “why-not” shrug.
    “What’s Daniels’ defense?” I said.
    “That’s just the trouble. When William’s mother called me, I had already seen the television story on the killing.”
    “Go on.”
    “Well, we had a murder involving hypnosis. I jumped at it because of—are you up on the Commonwealth’s view of hypnosis?”
    “No.”
    “Okay.” Rothenberg put the papers down. “Some states’ courts say a hypnotized witness can testify in court, some say he or she can’t because the very act of being hypnotized can block out certain memories and create certain others. You with me?”
    “So far.”
    “Well, our Supreme Judicial Court ruled in the Kater case that it would accept as competent a witness who had revealed certain facts before hypnosis but not facts revealed only under or after hypnosis. Okay?”
    “Okay, but—”
    “Let me finish. I figured we had a great test case under a footnote in Kater . You see, can a criminal defendant be kept off the stand, be incompetent as a witness, to tell his side of an event which would be revealed only after he’d been hypnotized?”
    “That’s what made the case seem interesting at first?”
    “Right.”
    “So what’s spoiled it?”
    “This,” he said, sliding the typed pages over to me.
    They were a transcription of notes taken by Rothenberg at an interview he had with Daniels a week earlier at the Middlesex County detention facility in the courthouse building in Cambridge. Rothenberg talked as I read. “There are so many of us sharing a secretary here, it takes a week to get anything that isn’t a life or death emergency.”
    I finished the transcription. If it was accurate, Daniels himself corroborated virtually every detail in the police version.
    I looked up. Rothenberg said, “See?”
    “I think so. Even if the trial judge would let Daniels testify after hypnosis, Daniels would just crucify himself.”
    “Exactly,” said Rothenberg, lacing his fingers behind his head and leaning back in his chair. He smiled at his apt pupil. “Putting Daniels on the stand would be suicide.”
    “And there goes the test-case part